Originally approved by the House in May, the bill squeezed through the Senate earlier this week by a solitary vote but had to return to the lower chamber for a rubber stamp of the Senate’s revisions.
“This bill is President Trump’s agenda, and we are making it law,” Johnson said in a determined statement, projecting confidence that Republicans were “ready to finish the job”.
The package honours many of Trump’s campaign promises, boosting military spending, funding a mass migrant deportation drive, and committing US$4.5 trillion ($7.4t) to extend his first-term tax relief.
But it is expected to pile an extra US$3.4t over a decade onto the country’s fast-growing deficits, while forcing through the largest cuts to the Medicaid health insurance programme since its 1960s launch.
Fiscal hawks in the House are chafing over spending cuts that they say fall short of what they were promised by hundreds of billions of dollars.
Johnson has to negotiate incredibly tight margins and can likely only lose three lawmakers among more than two dozen who have declared themselves open to rejecting the bill.
‘Abomination’
Lawmakers were hoping to return from recess to begin voting straight away, although they have a cushion of two days before Trump’s self-imposed July 4 deadline.
The 887-page text only passed in the Senate after a flurry of tweaks that pulled the House-passed text further to the right.
Republicans lost one conservative who was angry about adding to the country’s US$37t debt burden and two moderates worried about almost US$1t in health care cuts.
Some estimates put the total number of recipients set to lose their health insurance at 17 million, while scores of rural hospitals are expected to close.
Meanwhile, changes to federal nutrition assistance are set to strip millions of the poorest Americans of their access to the programme.
Johnson will be banking on Trump leaning on waverers, as he has in the past to turn around contentious House votes that were headed for failure.
The President has spent weeks cajoling Republicans torn between angering welfare recipients at home and incurring his wrath.
Trump pressured House Republicans to get the bill over the line in a private White House meeting with several holdouts today.
“Our country will make a fortune this year, more than any of our competitors, but only if the Big, Beautiful Bill is PASSED!” he said in a Truth Social post.
House Democrats have signalled that they plan to campaign on the bill to flip the chamber in the 2026 Midterm elections, pointing to analyses showing that it represents a historic redistribution of wealth from the poorest Americans to the richest.
“Shame on Senate Republicans for passing this disgusting abomination,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries told reporters.
-Agence France-Presse
